5 ms·

Is Cloud the New Mainframe?

42 points by as17237 3y ago

dusted 3y ago
Give it a bit of time, and mainframe become the new cloud, but only after a cycle of "everything on site[1]". This is not an industry that learns from the past when scrap can be acquired by relentless fashion grifting. [1] Edited as I discovered that premises is not simply plural of premise [2] [2] English is not my first language
- CharlesW 3y ago
  FYI, "premise" is a foundational idea or statement, so in this case you want to use "on premises" or "on prem". The premise of my response is that you'd find value in knowing the difference and will take it in the positive spirit in which it's intended.
- api 3y ago
  My biggest personal gripe with developer culture is how utterly historically ignorant it is. There's a general recency bias in the field where computing knowledge works like a social media feed. New ideas and new projects are at the top, and old stuff just falls off the bottom regardless of merit. Then someone re-invents it, often claiming credit (not deliberately dishonestly because they are ignorant), and then it runs its life cycle and scrolls off the bottom. Repeat, forever. There are a small number of things like very popular languages and OSes that have staying power but the rest of the ecosystem is fads and churn. There is some progress under the churn, but the actual progress is almost in spite of the fashion chasing. The churn just forces us to do a ton of extra busy-work re-implementing the universe constantly and chasing fads to remain compatible.
hprotagonist 3y ago
Hasn't this been obvious for a decade or more?
- mxuribe 3y ago
  Perhaps obvious for you and I (and some others too), but not for everyone...Because i'll make the assumption that you and I (and some others too) are living in the future. But, like the saying goes: the future is already here, its merely unequally distributed...Or something like that. ;-)
- foobarian 3y ago
  I mean... the very first few sentences of the Multics paper intro say it: > One of the overall design goals is to create a computing system which is capable of meeting almost all of the present and near-future requirements of a large computer utility.
- fulladder 3y ago
  Yes, but perhaps not to the enterprise buyer.
zwieback 3y ago
No, mainframe had almost exclusively dumb clients, at most some local display trickery but cloud is way, way more distributed. I think the main point is valid though: distribution of SW is now much easier, the stacks of floppies of my youth are luckily a faint memory.
bytearray 3y ago
Cloud is the new mainframe, Kubernetes is the new job manager, microservices are the new COBOL.
moandcompany 3y ago
In many cases its the new mainframe, but with more opaque, and as a consequence more fragile, abstractions
g9yuayon 3y ago
IBM Mainframe was an answer when computers couldn't vertical scale fast enough. Cloud is the answer when our systems couldn't horizontally scale fast and reliably enough. So, the real question is: can we really scale our need of computation again on a single computer or on a set of computers with low enough cost to render Cloud unnecessary?
- KaiserPro 3y ago
  > Cloud is the answer when our systems couldn't horizontally scale fast and reliably enough. Not quite, the cloud forced you to figure out how to scale, do reliability and all the hard parts, mainly because AWS didn't offer any features like zero downtime VM transfers or any kind of pracitcal storage migration. The point of the mainframe is that its almost like a really fucking huge lambda function host. You sling your app on the mainframe, ask for resources and let it run. If you run out of capacity, buy another mainframe and link it to the old one. Need a new region/reliability zone? pay a license, install a fat network link and jobs a goodun. There are videos of where HP/IBM literally blows up a mainframe to prove its auto failover skills. THe cloud is a poor proxy of what a mainframe _could_ do at its best. But its a reasonable facsimile of what a main frame did at it's worst.
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    And this tight coupling of code/process/data/apps to the platform is why mainframe migrations have a strong tendency to crash and burn. Folks should look at mainframes as a cautionary tale of "platforms".
- akira2501 3y ago
  > can we really scale our need of computation again on a single computer That door has been closed to chips built on CMOS for a long time. It's why we started scaling horizontally in our chips by adding more parallel cores. > to render Cloud unnecessary? The advantage with cloud is, the machines can die, and I'm not severely impacted. A new lambda machine will spool up, will be sent my function, will receive a copy of the asynchronous event to start working again. This, personally, is why I love the cloud. I no longer have to worry about the mapping of code to the hardware that will run it. I pay up front for designing my code around the architecture, but I win every time it runs in that I have essentially zero maintenance overhead associated with it.
johnklos 3y ago
For all the redundancies that exist, "cloud" isn't reliable and therefore can't replace the mainframe. Then again, most things don't need mainframe level reliability, which is why Microsoft Teams (and other Microsoft services) is problematic today.
- kmoser 3y ago
  It's not just a matter of reliability: mainframes allow tighter coupling between different parts of your application, thus faster performance, since everything is (or can be) essentially on the same hardware that is optimized for data processing. Cloud services are getting closer to bridging the gap, but for some applications mainframes will still be the only way to go. One main advantage that cloud has is you can distribute things into services that can be hosted anywhere: the same cloud service, a different cloud service, etc. Yes, you can do that with mainframes, too, but in the past mainframe software wasn't written with that flexibility. Today, everything is all about distributed microservices. As to the article's premise that people are getting locked into cloud services as they used to get locked into mainframe services, you could make the same argument about any tech: write your app with language X, and you'll have a hard time translating it to language Y. Write a low-level app that runs on Intel chips and you'll have a hard time porting it to Motorola. That's the nature of software development.
api 3y ago
It's a haphazard half-baked re-implementation of a lot of mainframe ideas with an extra helping of YAML and more rent extraction schemes. Plus it lets a whole generation think they invented these things (virtualization, containers, orchestration, containerized deployment, dynamic block storage, ingress/egress controllers, terminal aggregators, ...). Now that people are getting sick of cloud I'm sure we are going to re-invent personal computing now with entirely new terminology and re-implementation of all the original ideas. Just please no YAML.
- quonn 3y ago
  How can it possibly be more rent extracting than the mainframe? Also openness, choice of vendor, invisible hardware and virtually unlimited scalability are different.
KaiserPro 3y ago
If you are running serverless stuff then kinda. in terms of expense, then also maybe, but the point of a mainframe is that you got scaling and reliability as part of the cost, without having to think about it too much. The cloud puts most of the responsibility on you. you still can't live migrate processes from VM host to another VM host in AWS.
GMoromisato 3y ago
The article implies that Cloud is bad in the same way that Mainframe was bad. But I think we need to distinguish between the technology (HTTP-based, public internet services) and the business model (subscription-based SaaS). The latter may be bad in some cases, but the technology is here to stay. No one is going back to proprietary client-server systems. In fact, I think we can learn from the Mainframe. Mainframes had a much more cohesive and unified platform. I wish we could write a unified program (not a decoupled frontend/backend) and have it run on an abstract, scalable substrate (which happens to be implemented on a distributed system). Shameless self-promotion: I wrote about this a while back: Rise of the Hyperplatforms: https://gridwhale.medium.com/rise-of-the-hyperplatforms-d4a148e608de https://gridwhale.medium.com/rise-of-the-hyperplatforms-d4a1... GridWhale and a Brief History of Computing: https://gridwhale.medium.com/gridwhale-and-a-brief-history-of-computing-be24e5263328 https://gridwhale.medium.com/gridwhale-and-a-brief-history-o...
riffic 3y ago
centralization/decentralization pendulum
waynesonfire 3y ago
There is an interesting dichotomy I dont understand. We've seen the push to cloud saas, but a push to shrink llms to run on device. Why?
yellowapple 3y ago
Calling cloud computing "the new mainframe" is a bit of an understatement. One of the design goals of Multics was to establish computation as a sort of public utility, just like water or sewer or electric services; cloud providers seem to be filling that exact role, and I feel like it's only a matter of time before municipalities start establishing their own local cloud providers as public utilities.

42 points by as17237 3y ago

Give it a bit of time, and mainframe become the new cloud, but only after a cycle of "everything on site[1]". This is not an industry that learns from the past when scrap can be acquired by relentless fashion grifting. [1] Edited as I discovered that premises is not simply plural of premise [2] [2] English is not my first language

CharlesW 3y ago
FYI, "premise" is a foundational idea or statement, so in this case you want to use "on premises" or "on prem". The premise of my response is that you'd find value in knowing the difference and will take it in the positive spirit in which it's intended.
api 3y ago
My biggest personal gripe with developer culture is how utterly historically ignorant it is. There's a general recency bias in the field where computing knowledge works like a social media feed. New ideas and new projects are at the top, and old stuff just falls off the bottom regardless of merit. Then someone re-invents it, often claiming credit (not deliberately dishonestly because they are ignorant), and then it runs its life cycle and scrolls off the bottom. Repeat, forever. There are a small number of things like very popular languages and OSes that have staying power but the rest of the ecosystem is fads and churn. There is some progress under the churn, but the actual progress is almost in spite of the fashion chasing. The churn just forces us to do a ton of extra busy-work re-implementing the universe constantly and chasing fads to remain compatible.

hprotagonist 3y ago

Hasn't this been obvious for a decade or more?

mxuribe 3y ago
Perhaps obvious for you and I (and some others too), but not for everyone...Because i'll make the assumption that you and I (and some others too) are living in the future. But, like the saying goes: the future is already here, its merely unequally distributed...Or something like that. ;-)
foobarian 3y ago
I mean... the very first few sentences of the Multics paper intro say it: > One of the overall design goals is to create a computing system which is capable of meeting almost all of the present and near-future requirements of a large computer utility.
fulladder 3y ago
Yes, but perhaps not to the enterprise buyer.

zwieback 3y ago

No, mainframe had almost exclusively dumb clients, at most some local display trickery but cloud is way, way more distributed. I think the main point is valid though: distribution of SW is now much easier, the stacks of floppies of my youth are luckily a faint memory.

bytearray 3y ago

Cloud is the new mainframe, Kubernetes is the new job manager, microservices are the new COBOL.

moandcompany 3y ago

In many cases its the new mainframe, but with more opaque, and as a consequence more fragile, abstractions

g9yuayon 3y ago

IBM Mainframe was an answer when computers couldn't vertical scale fast enough. Cloud is the answer when our systems couldn't horizontally scale fast and reliably enough. So, the real question is: can we really scale our need of computation again on a single computer or on a set of computers with low enough cost to render Cloud unnecessary?

KaiserPro 3y ago
> Cloud is the answer when our systems couldn't horizontally scale fast and reliably enough. Not quite, the cloud forced you to figure out how to scale, do reliability and all the hard parts, mainly because AWS didn't offer any features like zero downtime VM transfers or any kind of pracitcal storage migration. The point of the mainframe is that its almost like a really fucking huge lambda function host. You sling your app on the mainframe, ask for resources and let it run. If you run out of capacity, buy another mainframe and link it to the old one. Need a new region/reliability zone? pay a license, install a fat network link and jobs a goodun. There are videos of where HP/IBM literally blows up a mainframe to prove its auto failover skills. THe cloud is a poor proxy of what a mainframe _could_ do at its best. But its a reasonable facsimile of what a main frame did at it's worst.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  And this tight coupling of code/process/data/apps to the platform is why mainframe migrations have a strong tendency to crash and burn. Folks should look at mainframes as a cautionary tale of "platforms".
akira2501 3y ago
> can we really scale our need of computation again on a single computer That door has been closed to chips built on CMOS for a long time. It's why we started scaling horizontally in our chips by adding more parallel cores. > to render Cloud unnecessary? The advantage with cloud is, the machines can die, and I'm not severely impacted. A new lambda machine will spool up, will be sent my function, will receive a copy of the asynchronous event to start working again. This, personally, is why I love the cloud. I no longer have to worry about the mapping of code to the hardware that will run it. I pay up front for designing my code around the architecture, but I win every time it runs in that I have essentially zero maintenance overhead associated with it.

johnklos 3y ago

For all the redundancies that exist, "cloud" isn't reliable and therefore can't replace the mainframe. Then again, most things don't need mainframe level reliability, which is why Microsoft Teams (and other Microsoft services) is problematic today.

kmoser 3y ago
It's not just a matter of reliability: mainframes allow tighter coupling between different parts of your application, thus faster performance, since everything is (or can be) essentially on the same hardware that is optimized for data processing. Cloud services are getting closer to bridging the gap, but for some applications mainframes will still be the only way to go. One main advantage that cloud has is you can distribute things into services that can be hosted anywhere: the same cloud service, a different cloud service, etc. Yes, you can do that with mainframes, too, but in the past mainframe software wasn't written with that flexibility. Today, everything is all about distributed microservices. As to the article's premise that people are getting locked into cloud services as they used to get locked into mainframe services, you could make the same argument about any tech: write your app with language X, and you'll have a hard time translating it to language Y. Write a low-level app that runs on Intel chips and you'll have a hard time porting it to Motorola. That's the nature of software development.

api 3y ago

It's a haphazard half-baked re-implementation of a lot of mainframe ideas with an extra helping of YAML and more rent extraction schemes. Plus it lets a whole generation think they invented these things (virtualization, containers, orchestration, containerized deployment, dynamic block storage, ingress/egress controllers, terminal aggregators, ...). Now that people are getting sick of cloud I'm sure we are going to re-invent personal computing now with entirely new terminology and re-implementation of all the original ideas. Just please no YAML.

quonn 3y ago
How can it possibly be more rent extracting than the mainframe? Also openness, choice of vendor, invisible hardware and virtually unlimited scalability are different.

KaiserPro 3y ago

If you are running serverless stuff then kinda. in terms of expense, then also maybe, but the point of a mainframe is that you got scaling and reliability as part of the cost, without having to think about it too much. The cloud puts most of the responsibility on you. you still can't live migrate processes from VM host to another VM host in AWS.

GMoromisato 3y ago

The article implies that Cloud is bad in the same way that Mainframe was bad. But I think we need to distinguish between the technology (HTTP-based, public internet services) and the business model (subscription-based SaaS). The latter may be bad in some cases, but the technology is here to stay. No one is going back to proprietary client-server systems. In fact, I think we can learn from the Mainframe. Mainframes had a much more cohesive and unified platform. I wish we could write a unified program (not a decoupled frontend/backend) and have it run on an abstract, scalable substrate (which happens to be implemented on a distributed system). Shameless self-promotion: I wrote about this a while back: Rise of the Hyperplatforms: https://gridwhale.medium.com/rise-of-the-hyperplatforms-d4a148e608de https://gridwhale.medium.com/rise-of-the-hyperplatforms-d4a1... GridWhale and a Brief History of Computing: https://gridwhale.medium.com/gridwhale-and-a-brief-history-of-computing-be24e5263328 https://gridwhale.medium.com/gridwhale-and-a-brief-history-o...

riffic 3y ago

centralization/decentralization pendulum

waynesonfire 3y ago

There is an interesting dichotomy I dont understand. We've seen the push to cloud saas, but a push to shrink llms to run on device. Why?

yellowapple 3y ago

Calling cloud computing "the new mainframe" is a bit of an understatement. One of the design goals of Multics was to establish computation as a sort of public utility, just like water or sewer or electric services; cloud providers seem to be filling that exact role, and I feel like it's only a matter of time before municipalities start establishing their own local cloud providers as public utilities.